Head of ChatGPT & Codex: The Next 6 Months Will Change Knowledge Work Forever

0:00 There is going to be dramatic change. Everyone is going to get their own little personal assistant on their computer that allows you to do more than whatever was possible 3 months ago, 6 months ago. >> This is the he runs chat GPT codeex and the APIs at Open AI, the tech powering most of the AI you already use every day. And he just told me that in a few months, people who don't use AI at all will get the same benefits as the ones who've spent the last 2 years figuring it out.

0:24 >> Today, you have to actively prompt and be creative about what you're asking. In the future, that's not the case anymore. >> What's going to make people brilliant? I guess >> if you're a creative person with good ideas, it's a great time to experiment. >> Can you show me a workflow everyone should be deploying today? >> One thing that I think this will mean is that >> my audience is some of them are developers, but a lot of them are knowledge workers and they're very excited about AI. And what we've been seeing with software engineering, right?

0:56 Google says 75% of their code is now AI written. So it has been really transformed by AI and you said something that this transformation will extend to all knowledge work over the next 6 months. So what do you think is going to be changing for people who are knowledge workers? I think it's not that much that people are going to change as the technology has matured and now agents are reliable over you know long horizons of capable of using many different tools you know computer use being one of them browser use we have added over like a 100 different plugins that can tap into you know every little tool that you already use in your life and the agent and GBT55 is like extremely reliable at it so it's more that the technology has matured than is ready and so everyone will be able to get benefits from an agent. Whereas before you had to be a little bit technical and you know get in there if it wasn't reliable if it was like struggling 5 minutes in you can kind maybe have to go into the configuration and obviously that requires like a technical background that's not the case anymore. So that's why I think it's going to be become like very widespread.

1:58 >> What do you think is going to change the most and say like if you take a marketer what's going to change their day-to-day with agents? >> So you're going to look at what can you automate? Oh, maybe I spend like 1 hour, you know, doing market research. Maybe I spend one hour like summarizing a whole bunch of inbound and emails. Maybe I spend like, you know, two hours going through like prospects. And so, a lot of the concepts that were like, you know, advanced concepts or maybe six months ago, such as like running something on on a cron schedule, like nowadays, it's just like in the app, you can just say like, you know, run this every 12 hours, you know, do some market research, send me a PDF, >> and it's going to send it to you over email.

2:36 >> Yes. send you can send it to you over email or you can you know just consume it in the app maybe you can print it. I did this uh a couple of weeks ago where I would summarize uh all the news from Slack and then print it on my printer physically like every day so I would have it with the coffee. >> Oh wow. This is like very executive way of know just kind of want my newspaper this kind of thing is just to become is going to be mainstream.

3:02 >> You know what I was really inspired by? I was watching one of your podcasts where you were talking with uh Greg about having this dashboard basically when you wake up in the morning, you have your coffee and it just tells you like can you approve this and I'm going to run it. Can you approve? So you just basically read through whatever your AI agent did while you were sleeping and you're approving and it's continuing its work. When do you think it's going to be a reality?

3:24 >> It's not that far off. The technology already exists. It's about packaging it. M >> for example, last week we released auto review which is um a concept it definitely blew my mind when we did the research on it. So you have the main agent doing actions and then you have a second agent that is verifying all the actions of the first agent >> and verifying that they are not doing anything that could be harmful to you and like you know are low risk. And so that's an innovation that came out of our safety team uh and and and alignment team um primarily like alignment research and it allows you to run an agent much more like you know for longer periods of time autonomously even handling you know quite sensitive data >> without risking for example you know your agent like sending an email to a stranger with some of your personal information in there. Now that you have these pieces to make it more secure, more safe um and you're willing to give access to a lot of things in your life.

4:18 >> How do we organize our data? Imagine we're all getting ready to deploy a first agent, right? Uh and the thing is, uh agent needs good data. Uh and sometimes, you know, I've been working with mostly my tone of voice like personal dossier, but then I realized that my agent would really benefit from knowing my strategy when it creates content for me. So, what would you say to someone who's just starting out? How do they organize this data? What are the must-h have files that they have to create?

4:46 >> I organize everything on like local files on my computer. So, I have a folder. I have my notes in there. I keep it like fairly tidy and you know, I use my agent to organize it and then it grows over time. >> That that's my question. People work with little computers. I have a laptop that I travel with. I have two Macs and one in my studio, one in my office. >> Yeah. So what we're going to see over the next three months is all of this is going to come to the cloud and you're not going to have to manage like local files on you know just your laptop and then you know if you happen to travel >> and you're on your phone oh now suddenly it's not the same agent.

5:20 >> Yeah. >> Um and that's that's annoying because you have like you know two separate entities that you need to sort of like you know map two different things in your life. Um so a lot of this is going to come to to the cloud. It's going to manage its own memory. is going to manage, you know, help you manage like files that are just like hosted somewhere. >> Um, there's no good solution yet, which is, you know, sort of surprising.

5:40 >> Yeah, I'm I'm just putting everything into my Google Drive and I'm connecting a Google Drive folder. >> Yeah, that works. That works. >> Uh, what are the files that everyone should uh come up with for their agents? >> Um, >> if we're talking about productivity for knowledge workers, >> yes, ton of voice is a good one. M >> um and for that maybe surprisingly like I don't recommend you know actually trying to explain your tone of voice. I recommend uh just including examples >> of you know like past um you know newsletters maybe that you you published or you know snippets from you know like recordings um or you know like messages that you sent you know to friends and and and um in different like maybe professional and personal settings. I have a lot of uh notes around like projects that I have various like each project has its own folder um with various files in it.

6:28 >> Yeah. >> Um and then contacts but you don't have to maintain everything in files. You can also just rely on you know like all the productivity apps that you already have and then you know Codex for example will be able to go and pull the right information. >> How do you know when you stay inside a project or you want to codeex to actually build something like a tool or an app? Sometimes I feel like, you know, I need like a dedicated app for for for like a new use case and then I go and like I create a new folder and then I just like experiment in there. But nowadays more and more I feel like I need less of static apps that just can do one thing and I rely just more on my agent to do everything for me.

7:08 >> If somebody starts using agents and somebody doesn't, what's the difference in their productivity in say one or three years? >> One to three years is like so far off. um the technology itself like will change so much uh by then. What we're going to see is you know like people who are willing to adapt and discover these things are you know going to be quite a bit more productive and it's going to enable to do like you know all these things that you sort of like know maybe put off. Everyone is going to you know get their own like little personal assistant on their computer you know doing all of like you know maybe filing your taxes setting up like email filters telling you and helping you like get more in touch with like you know your loved ones. That is something that will connect a lot of people.

7:48 >> When I started using more AI, I felt this responsibility dilemma. You just mentioned like taxes, right? >> Right. >> Yeah. AI can totally do taxes for me and I have this automation that tells me every month how much tax I'm going to owe and what tax strategies I could be deploying. Do I want to be responsible for that? I don't know. Like when it comes to these tasks, also as an entrepreneur, I totally realize if you're just starting out today, you're much more productive. But if you're an existing entrepreneur, I wouldn't really fire anyone on my team because an AI agent can run it. I would just ask that person to use that AI agent. Where where do you see this go? Because I feel like when I started running so many agents, I feel responsible that I need to check on them. I need to verify their output. I'm like, oh, I'll just let somebody else handle it.

8:34 >> That's interesting. So, at the end of the day, humans remain responsible. And then you know the way that we think about it is actually just really about augmenting your own capabilities >> and giving you a tool that allows you to do more than whatever was possible three months ago, six months ago and take a lot of like the the boring parts of the work as well and just do that automatically for you. It is important as we see this for for coding is for us is like if you if you produce a piece of code you know you are responsible for it. Um if it breaks it's not it's not the agent's fault it's it's your fault.

9:06 Um same for code review and like you cannot outsource like understanding at the end of the day humans you know are still remain in control and remain uh the people who need to understand the entire system and how how things work and so if you view it under the lens of like you know augmenting your own productivity as a human it's like you know obviously you know you need humans after all we're building for ourselves to better our own lives. Yeah, it's just I feel like I become much more productive first, but then I'm like because I want to optimize so many things, my brain just started exploding.

9:36 >> There is a there is a pitfall of like know maybe you know falling too much into you know using using it for everything and feeling like maybe you can do things but you're a little bit too early on the capability curve >> and so like maybe things you know will be possible with future models. That's good. That means that you're pushing and you're sort of like, you know, discovering, you know, where where it's reliable, where maybe it needs a little bit more work and maybe this will be something that you can do in like 3 months, 6 months. Today's conversation is another reminder of how much AI has sped everything up. My calendar this year has more meetings in it than ever before. So, I've been testing a lot of different things to keep up. A couple I've been using lately, the Soundcore Liberty Pro Series, Liberty 5 Pro, and Liberty 5 Pro Max. Both have the same noise cancellation and call quality. The Pro Max is also equipped with built-in AI functions designed specifically for business people, and several other features have pleasantly surprised me.

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11:33 If you're running a busy lifestyle with back-to-back calls, no time to take notes. Liberty 5 Pro series are worth trying. 30 days free trial, easy returns if you're not satisfied. The link is in the description. Now, back to our conversation with Tibo. Okay, let's talk about VIP coding in general. So, I shared before the podcast that in Lingu, we're actually vip coding a lot of different apps and we have a technical person who can actually write code and he's really good at it, but then it's also us who can't. And when we vibe code something it's if it works great but then the technical person comes in and says oh I would have structured it in a different way because if we wanted to grow it like for example we have this app that is 300 most useful words in English right and the way it was webcoded in a perfect way so it's usable but if we want to extend it and make it like a thousand useful words then the architecture is a little bit off. What would you say like how would you approach VIP coding these days? If you're thinking of building something like it's going to be a big company, should you work with a technical person or still try and vibe code it?

12:35 >> If the goal is to share it with, you know, a couple of people and like try something out and you know, build it for for the joy of it, you know, definitely like just cutting it by yourself with the help of an agent. It's like that's perfectly fine. If the goal is to scale it and you know make something that is successful you know for like you know hundreds of thousands of people or more um having a technical person like in the mix is still useful. I do expect that you know over time to go away um where you know you will have agents which are able to like you know understand the long-term maintenance aspects you know the right structure and be able to like you know handhold you all the way to scaling to like you know very large and successful like product. What do you think is the timeline because it's it's been changing so fast.

13:21 >> We will see significant improvements towards like long-term maintainability of code uh over the next 6 to9 months um in order to like not need the help of like someone more technical at all. Um that feels like quite quite a quite a far off. >> Yeah. What do you think in general about the future of software engineering? I was just moderating a panel uh around it uh with uh you know deep learning AI. Mhm. >> Uh and we're talking about like how we all had a consensus of six people on the panel that you just you still need technical knowledge but you also need to become a generalist and because everyone is vibe coding apps like as a creator I would have never thought of building an app 10 years ago because I knew how expensive it was. Now I would build an app but then I will see thousands of people using it and I will experience some bugs and I will need a technical person. Are we going to need more software engineers or less with this?

14:14 Yeah, I think we're going to see an explosion um in the amount of, you know, infrastructure and apps that we built. And nowadays, it's it's just it's awesome because if you just have an idea, you can you can build it or at least in some shape you can build it. uh if you're a creative person, you know, with good ideas, it's a great time to experiment and then you can you know quickly prototype, iterate and get to something that you feel, you know, like might be successful out there and then it's hard to like put a limit and you know how much software is enough. How much demand is there for more software in the world? Like how many more problems can we solve? It feels like we're at the very beginning of >> Feels like we keep coming up with problems we can solve.

14:57 >> Exactly. Right. So it's like you know as long as that continues to be through and you know we are able to continue technological like advancement it feels like you know there will be demand for a lot of technical folks. >> Yeah. Can you show me a workflow that everyone should be deploying today to maximize their productivity? Can you think of something? >> It really varies. Um it depends like you know one one of the things that I do is I use it to stay in tune with what the world thinks for example about CEX >> and so I receive like a daily summary >> something for me something like that >> so let's do a new chat for example you know I am on a podcast uh talking about AI and codeex um find relevant uh emails in my inbox uh and uh uh prepare draft replies uh based on what you know about my priorities uh from memory. So you haven't uh you haven't built uh memories yet >> but if you use if you use codeex a lot it will learn about >> memory from chbd as well right >> yeah another one is uh you know go through internet sources and give me a breakdown of what codeex shipped over the last two weeks and we can go back to email. Um, I have a messy inbox in for Gmail. Um, set up filters for it to keep, >> you know, I remember I think it was like 2019 or something. I spent a couple days just organizing my emails and folders and then I realized it's such a waste of time because I spent so much time >> to plan a trip, you know, to like where where should we go >> based on my calendar availability, right? Yeah.

16:57 >> Or something. >> Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For example, >> it can connect to my calendar. uh a trip plan um and use my calendar availability to plan it for example and so it's going to go like here it's you can see it's gone through your email so this one is like I'm a podcast talking about AI and CEX it's already gone through your email found several live threads related to today's uh thing >> um you know it went through the calendar. It's all still going through um emails. So, it's found like a bunch of things. Um apparently you have like you know >> codeex which is today >> and then you know here you have another one. So, you know you can see like we're doing um a lot of things you know in parallel. You can just like run you know little agentic threads. Uh here you could say like I am making a presentation uh put this in uh Google slide and it will go and it will just prepare like you know a Google slide for all of the content.

18:05 >> The editing is going to be within the app or I will have to leave and go to Google slides. >> So there is an inapp browser as well. >> Um I don't know if you've set up your pet. No, not yet. So we also shipped like this cute little feature. >> Oh I just said on your X. So now, you know, you can move this across uh and you can see like, you know, which which threads it's still working on. So, for example, like it's still summarizing Codex updates. It's currently setting up uh some some email filters.

18:33 >> Um I don't want to make changes to your inbox, so I'm just going to stop this one. Um >> but yeah, this is sort of like a brief >> Can you talk to me about this dashboard that I was >> You have a you have a trip to uh Creed's plant now. >> Nice. So it went through my calendar. Okay. So I this morning I actually asked my chat GPT based on my queries what app should I build and it gave me five ideas and this was one of the ideas where it's content repurposing >> and um >> can you rate it like my my so it's it was basically a very basic prompt. I gave it a link to my MD files.

19:11 >> That's cool. Uh, I created this app, but the only thing I wanted to be able to dictate into the app so it can convert it into an actual email newsletter, but I don't think it worked. >> Okay. So, let's have a look. So, this was content repurposing engine, you know, from all the the posts. Okay. And then it just built all of that for you. >> Well, it built something too fancy. I'm like, let's let's just make it very simple.

19:36 >> You were like, okay, this is you're a little being a little bit too ambitious here. >> Yeah. Yeah. Um, and then it has Oh, I see. I see. >> Uh, AB testing. >> It's like already a newsletter draft. >> Yeah. It actually I like that it didn't wait for my prompt. It just >> This is cool. It just It just did a lot of these things like by itself. It was like, you know, this is probably what you need.

19:57 >> Yeah. >> And then the only thing that doesn't work is like able to dictate into the app. Yeah. >> Is it something that another prompt is going to fix or >> Yes. Yes. So um want you to speak to the we have voice dictation here, right? So um >> no I mean into the app. >> Yes. Yes. Yes. So let's use it. Let's do a nested. Okay. >> Okay. So in the app uh we have we don't have dictation uh working. So can you integrate it with the open AI uh speechtoext API? For that, you will need an API key, but you can just make it up for now. And you can go through the latest documentation online to figure out, you know, how to integrate the OpenAI speech to text uh API into this app.

20:42 >> That was a very sophisticated prompt. How do I know that I needed that prompt? Because I would never think about API keys. >> Oh, that's why sometimes you still need someone who's like a little bit technical. But a lot of these things that right now maybe are still a little bit in the realm of like oh you need more of a technical background are going to come and become mainstream. So you know maybe you need you need me today but you know in 3 months it's like it will be able to set all of this up. It will just um connect it to your OpenAI account and you know you don't need to set up like a separate API key >> and it's going to be able to just connect to everything. Okay. while it's building. Can you talk about like the most sophisticated use case or maybe like that the use cases that are very sophisticated in terms of workflow but that change productivity tremendously for for people day-to-day something that everyone could get inspired by.

21:32 >> So you can say like you know go through um you can you can tag a lot of different plugins. So you can say Gmail >> calendar if you have like uh docs. Yeah. and um and be my chief of staff >> and give me a breakdown of my day, a summary of what is important and prepare me. And then you just run this at the start of the day and then you can be more specific than the the example prompt that I I gave here. like some some people that I've seen like you know have like fairly sophisticated you know requests for like know how to be prepared.

22:18 >> Yeah. And like where am I wasting my time? Should I be hiring someone to fix something where you see I'm spending most of my hours or building an app that's going to like optimization? >> You can really discuss you know with with codeex then and start to brainstorm you know about how you can streamline things. >> Your calendar says this parts with high consequence. So it seems like you're doing good. Okay. Yeah, cuz I only put important stuff in the calendar. I don't put like dayto-day.

22:47 >> Okay, cool. What do you uh personally use and in what order for for which tasks? >> So, I use it for coding a lot. Uh I use it to help uh strategize for the different pieces that we're planning to put out like you know in what order like the narrative to to to construct. So, it's like it's a great Todd partner. use it to like organize all my own notes throughout the day. So instead of taking notes in like a separate notes app now I just take them like straight into CEX >> and it just builds up memories >> like you just start a new chat for anything you want to say >> and I'm just like hey this is what I'm thinking. Yeah.

23:22 >> And then at the end of the day does it automatically summarize it or you have to prompt it? >> Um I prompted to like then you know dump everything into a doc. Um but also it like builds up memories. I use it to uh often stay on top of unanswered like important unanswered uh emails or slack messages. >> Are you seeing the shift from more code work being done with AI to more productivity stuff or has it been equal?

23:49 >> Uh so it is interesting to think about you know what is what does an engineer what does a programmer do all day and like already there the majority of the time is not spent on coding actually. So we saw we saw a shift over time you know even including in our technical user base over way over like 50% uh of the tasks done on codex are like nontechnical tasks today >> already >> yes >> and it's been what a year since you >> uh the app has only been three months >> okay we launched around three months the codeci which was definitely for programmers that was a year ago >> so what are people using it for what do you see what are the use cases >> there's a lot of like help me and help me organize thinking through thris. Um, now with computer use and browser use, it can, you know, do things such as like order on Door Dash for you, like you know, do your shopping.

24:38 >> Does it take long? I haven't tried it on brows yet, but sometimes the agentic browsers are like, >> no, we have the fastest computer use implementation out there. >> It's it's um it's surprisingly quick. So, you know, you will see it like you know, click around. So, for example, I can >> Can we ask it to go and download my LinkedIn analytics? Okay. So, let's do let's do add computer. >> Um, and then go to LinkedIn and download my analytics. Um, and in the format we said a spreadsheet spreadsheet. Yeah.

25:13 >> Uh, and create a spreadsheet. There you go. So, let's let's see what it does. I'll use the desktop controls. This might take five to 10 minutes. >> So, so it's the difference from chat GPT is that it's it can use your computer. Yes, it can use your computer. It's a full agent that works and has access to your browser. Can you click around on your apps as well >> and you you can look at it here. So, it's it's already it's visiting.

25:39 >> Yeah, it it is it is already on my LinkedIn page. >> Yes. Uh so, let's let's see what it does over time. >> I think it's >> here. You can see it's like it's navigating here. >> Exporting something. >> It is already saving stuff. That's amazing. While we wait for him to finish, I wanted to ask you something. You dropped out of your PhD, right? After two weeks. >> After two weeks, that's right. >> Start a company. Would you recommend to someone who's doing their PhD or bachelor, masters now and feel that >> they're just hating it? Is it good time to quit or >> this was a long time ago. This was almost 15 years ago. So, I'm not sure.

26:16 >> No, it's even like I feel like >> it's relevant. >> But but it's interesting how the meaning of education has changed in these 15 years. What what do you think from like seeing all the innovation inside open AI deep mind should people be still pursuing like very deep education or should they just go out and start building? >> The reason I dropped out of my PhD is I just actually after starting it I felt like that was committing four years of my life to that specific subject was actually not what I wanted to do >> and uh I had more ideas and more things that I wanted to try.

26:47 >> Uh and so I felt like the startup startup environment was like right for me. I think it's very important to like time and time again like you know in my own life you know I've realized like it's important to follow your instincts >> um and do things that give you energy. >> Was it the right decision for you? >> Oh absolutely absolutely I had such a great time you know I built I built that company for like a year and then I went on work worked for Google. Um, initially I was like working on Google maps and different parts ads and then I ended up working at the deep mind which was during the the golden ages of deep mind like when it was like grand challenge after grand challenge and then it became like a little bit less interesting and uh around the time where you know everyone was scaling uh and like opening had proven that you could scale transformers um and create something like very compelling and this was probably the road to to building AGI that's when you know I was like just uh okay let me go just go work for OpenAI.

27:41 Um and you know time and time again I sort of like you know challenging myself to pursue new things. >> Mhm. So before we um look at what has created uh one final question what do you think is going to happen to our lives in 3 to 5 years from all the innovation that you've seen. Do you think we're going to see this dramatic change that a lot of people are talking about or are they exaggerating?

28:02 >> I think there is going to be dramatic change. I think it's important you know for for us uh and for me personally to really bring the benefits to everyone and one thing that I think this will mean is that you will have the benefits you know whether whether you're actively engaging with this technology or not um today you have to actively prompt and sort of like know be creative about what you what you're asking and you know it's almost like the the benefits that you get are definitely like you know proportional to like you know how your prompting is, you know, in the future that will not be true. It's sort of like it will to me, you know, be very similar to going to a nice tailor who sort of like, you know, instantly looks at you and gets you and it's like, you know, this is the kind of clothes that would, you know, make you shine and that is like, you know, just like right for you.

28:49 >> So, what will it depend on then? If it's not your prompting, what's going to make people brilliant, I guess. >> Yes. you know it will be much more like benefiting from you know good advice from a friend or like you know having a natural conversation like the conversation that we have right now. >> So like the the ability to ask the right questions not to necessarily prompt them. >> It will it will it will be about engaging you know as your authentic self in a conversation and then getting the appropriate help in the right at the right time >> um and you know having benefiting from this you know ambient intelligence that is just like supporting the society.

29:23 Okay. Um it has created a spreadsheet. >> Oh, there we go. >> So, it has downloaded all the analytics from um >> Oh, that's amazing. Well, well, it's okay. We We needed But this is okay. Like, uh if I ask it to do more specific because it did like one screenshot, but we can >> What else would you like it? We could run it again. So, I need more data, you know, for example, >> impressions uh per post. Okay. So I am very lazy now with codeex and I just do everything for voice. So I need more data impressions per post.

29:57 >> Yeah. Same same. I just use whisper flow across all my Yeah. Okay. Let us end this daily brief. It did it. Yeah. Oh, this is getting better. See, >> and then you can continue to go and uh you know you can you can get more advanced if you there's a workflow then that you like then you know you can you can use uh the skill creator uh this is a skill by itself and then you can say like create a skill to capture uh this workflow um such that uh I can run it every day and then it will create a bespoke skill for you that you can >> collect analytics and add it to file.

30:42 >> Okay, this is fascinating. Thank you so much. Uh I feel like I have some work to do when I come back home tonight. Uh this is really fascinating. Thank you for building it. >> Of course. Yeah, it was a pleasure. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> I also write a newsletter where I go deeper on AI tools that I use, career strategies, and things I can't fit into a 30 minute podcast. It's free. Link is in the description.